Rev. William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006)

Crisis Management

Yesterday's Washington Post has a story that sheds some light on the much-hyped "war on boys" in education. Guess we'll have to go back to the war on Christmas, or the war on the war on Christmas, or something to keep the paranoid right buzzing.

Remember when conservatives decried the "victim mentality" of advocates for women and the poor? Turns out they just wanted to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves. Or as some in the blogosphere have put it, IOKIYAR (it's OK if you're a Republican). Who knew?

The Doctor Is In

President Bush has committed $500 million to his "Healthy Marriage Initiative", which helps "couples who choose marriage for themselves gain greater access, on a voluntary basis, to services where they can develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage."

But it turns out that some of these "services" are (surprise!) religious-based organizations that equate "healthy" marriages with ones in which wives stay home and offer helpful advice to their overworked spouses:

"The married man won't go to work hung over, exhausted or tardy because of fewer bachelor habits, and because he eats better and sees the doctor sooner, thanks to his wife. She is also a good adviser on career decisions, and relieves him of chores, so he can do a better job."

In the meantime, the administration is cutting funding for programs that help women break into non-traditional fields of work with much higher rates of pay than the usual "pink collar" jobs. It seems that a healthily-married woman is a dependent one. Or a poor one, anyway.

Life is Cheap, Part XLVII

Why would women leaving a religious event stampede and crush a bunch of other women and children? Were they so covered up that they could not see properly? Were they made to hurry for some reason so that they couldn't stop? How the hell could something like this happen? Maybe I just don't understand crowd dynamics, but there has got to be some serious negligence going on here.

Bad enough when human beings shoot and blow each other up. But when they kill themselves through mindless herd behavior I really wonder if the human race isn't just too stupid to live.

Update: Qatar's The Peninsula newspaper says that the crush was set off when someone yelling for help with a fallen child set off a panic in the crowd. Of course, having more than one exit for 50,000 people might also have helped:

...Dawat-e-Islami party spokesman Nadeem Qadri blamed the authorities for closing off some exit points to the mosque because of earlier construction work.

“These congregations are nothing new in the city. For the last 15 years we held it every week. The incident took place because the government had closed three entry and exit points because of a newly constructed park,” he said.

So it's not mindless herd behavior but mindless official incompetence....the world makes sense again.

State authorities have ordered an inquiry into the incident.

American Idol

Howard Zinn writes about, among other things, the idea of American exceptionalism--that we are taught to believe that we are the standard-bearers of a new and better politics, a new and better life--either because we were chosen for this task by a superior being or because of our superior western culture. Therefore no one could possibly want to resist having our values and institutions imposed--excuse me, bestowed--on them. Therefore anyone who does resist must be, ipso facto, a terrorist and "dead-ender" and we are justified in blasting them off the face of the earth. God be praised.

A more accurate reading of history might lead us to re-examine this belief and conduct ourselves with a little more humility--but that brings us to another problem, for "we" are not the unified body that conventional history and politics would have us believe. We--that is, you and I--may be humble, may desire humility in foreign affairs, may even benefit from it. But this administration and its backers do not represent you and me and the consequences, good and bad, of their actions do not fall equally on all. The people who benefit from wars and aggression are not the same people who pay the price. Ditto for oil price hikes, political instability, unemployment, deficits....

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Now we are told that the people of Iran will rise up and overthrow their government once the bombing starts. But will they? And if not, who loses? Who wins?

The Mother of All Hot Flashes

So are we going to nuke Iran?

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me [Hersh] that the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government."

And since these guys were so accurate in their predictions on Iraq, we should trust them on this one, right?

It always amazes me when someone expects people in other countries to respond to aggression in ways that we ourselves never would. If we were attacked, would we rise up and overthrow the government? Or would we put aside our feelings about the government (hard as that might be to do) and fight tooth and nail to defend our country, our homes and our families?

Of course we would. And I don't believe that anyone would make this assumption about a westernized society. It is a racist assumption that says that people in Iraq, or in Iran or in Vietnam or in Palestine are cowards. That they are afraid to fight, they have no pride and do not love their countries as we do; therefore, they will give up and do what we want.

Funny how we always turn out to be wrong about that. Funny how we never seem to learn from our mistakes either. Because it's always someone else's fault: the liberals, the media...the French. This would merely be an annoying trait in a ten-year-old. In the men with their fingers on the nuclear trigger, it is dangerous bordering on insane.